Politics and letters come together for an evening of readings by Dana Spiotta, Will Hermes, Tina Chang, and student contributors to 12thstreetonline.com, the undergraduate online literary journal, published by the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy, of the undergraduate writing program at the New School.

Dana Spiotta is the author of the novels Lightning Field (2002); Eat the Document (2006), which was a National Book Award finalist and the winner of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Stone Arabia (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Will Hermes is author of the book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (2012), a senior critic for Rolling Stone and a longtime contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. His work also appears inThe New York Times and The Village Voice. He was coeditor of SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music.

Tina Chang was raised in New York City. Brooklyn Poet Laureate, she is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses (2004) and Of Gods & Strangers (2011). She is co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). Her poems have been published in American Poet, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and Ploughshares, among others. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and she is also a member of the international writing faculty at the City University of Hong Kong, the first low-residency MFA program to be established in Asia.